Soup's on!

Crossposted here and here.

Yesterday, I ran across a photo that made me start drooling:



That came from Snowy Days & Great Food, at an excellent photo blog with some great nature shots by Bryant Altizer, a professional photographer back home. I only just discovered it.*

Great food is right! That got me craving a big pot of soup. Then sanity struck, and I scaled it down to a 3.5L crock pot load, with only two people here to eat it. ;)

I have been holding off on the soups and stews--since vatine obviously doesn't think most of them qualify as "great food"!--but couldn't resist the craving. I grew up eating a lot of soup and stew, chock full of veggies; either he didn't, or he got really tired of them.

Yeah, looking at the ingredients and who was making it, I figured it was probably Indian soup, but as Cliff Lowe (coming from a similar background) put it in an article on the prevalence of Native-derived food in the South:

She used to make a rich vegetable soup that she called (can you believe it?) Vegetable Soup. Imagine my surprise when, years later, I came across her same recipe in a cookbook about Native American cooking and found that all those years I had been eating 'Cherokee Pepper Pot Soup.'

Here's some more interesting food writing from Cliff Lowe, BTW. I can totally see Texas chili as the kind of stew a Mexican cook might make if given a bunch of pemmican to work with.

My mom mostly just called it Soup. Yeah, we ate lots of other kinds of soups, but something like that was the Generic "I'm going to make a big pot of" Soup, and we had it at least a couple of times a month. (Usually for a couple of days, until I was thoroughly sick of it!) If we had a lot of leftover and stray odds and ends of vegetables to use up, I started calling it Garbage Soup--which didn't greatly thrill my mother. ;) We ate it even more often when we were particularly low on money.

It's cheap to make (especially if you have a garden and/or the time and inclination to hunt or snare rabbits), tasty, and nutritious. Did I mention tasty?

If you eat this kind of thing on a regular basis, it would be very hard indeed to avoid your 5-9 daily servings of veggies and fruits! I feel Deprived at Five. And, BTW, under normal circumstances, it really does not matter how much salt you eat; you're getting more than enough potassium from all those veggies to balance it out, unless you regularly go around munching on rock salt for a snack. And I think again of Rita Laws' Native Americans and Vegetarianism, which overstates things AFAICT (bottom of the page), but makes some good points about just how much fruit and veggies people were/are eating a lot of places.


( How to make Soup and Stew )

Today's pot of still-simmering soup, before the chicken's gone in. I am not a photographer. ;)


( What's in today's batch? )

Making the soup today, I couldn't help but be glad again for the year-round availability of canned and frozen veggies! (Cheaper, frequently better quality, and not as generally problematic as a lot of out-of-season fresh stuff.) Especially since I don't have room for a garden right now. It saves a lot of hassle, and makes it possible for me to have closer to a summer version of this kind of soup in April.

Before that, I guess people had to use leather britches or (brine) pickled green beans, dry hominy or pickled corn, dried tomatoes, dried beans instead of fresh shelled beans, and so on. Food you've grown and preserved yourself certainly has its appeal, but being able to buy a can or frozen bag of green beans sure is easier!

I may have to start working on my food and recipe pages again. (That's not even up now, at all, along with the rest of my old website.) Not only is that kind of thing fun, I feel an urge to demonstrate that we Hillbillies do, indeed, have a food culture--which does not involve much in the way of roadkill. When even the origins of many dishes have been obfuscated, there's a lot of ignorance going on, and some people might be interested in finding out more. The acceptable level of ignorance and bigotry*** (not to mention exoticizing and condescension) still amazes me.

_____________

( The obligatory endnotes ;) )

Soup's on!

Crossposted here and here.

Yesterday, I ran across a photo that made me start drooling:



That came from Snowy Days & Great Food, at an excellent photo blog with some great nature shots by Bryant Altizer, a professional photographer back home. I only just discovered it.*

Great food is right! That got me craving a big pot of soup. Then sanity struck, and I scaled it down to a 3.5L crock pot load, with only two people here to eat it. ;)

I have been holding off on the soups and stews--since vatine obviously doesn't think most of them qualify as "great food"!--but couldn't resist the craving. I grew up eating a lot of soup and stew, chock full of veggies; either he didn't, or he got really tired of them.

Yeah, looking at the ingredients and who was making it, I figured it was probably Indian soup, but as Cliff Lowe (coming from a similar background) put it in an article on the prevalence of Native-derived food in the South:

She used to make a rich vegetable soup that she called (can you believe it?) Vegetable Soup. Imagine my surprise when, years later, I came across her same recipe in a cookbook about Native American cooking and found that all those years I had been eating 'Cherokee Pepper Pot Soup.'

Here's some more interesting food writing from Cliff Lowe, BTW. I can totally see Texas chili as the kind of stew a Mexican cook might make if given a bunch of pemmican to work with.

My mom mostly just called it Soup. Yeah, we ate lots of other kinds of soups, but something like that was the Generic "I'm going to make a big pot of" Soup, and we had it at least a couple of times a month. (Usually for a couple of days, until I was thoroughly sick of it!) If we had a lot of leftover and stray odds and ends of vegetables to use up, I started calling it Garbage Soup--which didn't greatly thrill my mother. ;) We ate it even more often when we were particularly low on money.

It's cheap to make (especially if you have a garden and/or the time and inclination to hunt or snare rabbits), tasty, and nutritious. Did I mention tasty?

If you eat this kind of thing on a regular basis, it would be very hard indeed to avoid your 5-9 daily servings of veggies and fruits! I feel Deprived at Five. And, BTW, under normal circumstances, it really does not matter how much salt you eat; you're getting more than enough potassium from all those veggies to balance it out, unless you regularly go around munching on rock salt for a snack. And I think again of Rita Laws' Native Americans and Vegetarianism, which overstates things AFAICT (bottom of the page), but makes some good points about just how much fruit and veggies people were/are eating a lot of places.


( How to make Soup and Stew )

Today's pot of still-simmering soup, before the chicken's gone in. I am not a photographer. ;)


( What's in today's batch? )

Making the soup today, I couldn't help but be glad again for the year-round availability of canned and frozen veggies! (Cheaper, frequently better quality, and not as generally problematic as a lot of out-of-season fresh stuff.) Especially since I don't have room for a garden right now. It saves a lot of hassle, and makes it possible for me to have closer to a summer version of this kind of soup in April.

Before that, I guess people had to use leather britches or (brine) pickled green beans, dry hominy or pickled corn, dried tomatoes, dried beans instead of fresh shelled beans, and so on. Food you've grown and preserved yourself certainly has its appeal, but being able to buy a can or frozen bag of green beans sure is easier!

I may have to start working on my food and recipe pages again. (That's not even up now, at all, along with the rest of my old website.) Not only is that kind of thing fun, I feel an urge to demonstrate that we Hillbillies do, indeed, have a food culture--which does not involve much in the way of roadkill. When even the origins of many dishes have been obfuscated, there's a lot of ignorance going on, and some people might be interested in finding out more. The acceptable level of ignorance and bigotry*** (not to mention exoticizing and condescension) still amazes me.

_____________

( The obligatory endnotes ; )